CNN Tomorrow

John Roberts’ show at 6:20 am to talk about the Parliamentary Committee. Roberts visited CRU in the heat of Climategate. They said that I would be appearing with Michael Mann – anyone heard of him? In the re-confirm, they said that I’d be appearing with Mike MacCracken.

I agree with KuhnKat about the likely order of play. The courage of the main protagonists in this shambles never fails to inspire. Don’t mention the war – or even the name of the person who has single-handedly taken you down, in everything but name (and juicy government grants). What heroes we’ve created for the next generation of scientists to look up and aspire to. What a shower.

Quantifying uncertainty in cases like this can be difficult for many reasons: The “sampled” population is not the same as the “target” population (potentially introducing bias and, where adjustments are made, errors associated with the adjustments); observations are correlated in time and space (reducing effective sample size); there may be substantial systematic bias in the data; etc. As a result, one should be cautious about assuming that mean square error is inversely proportional to sample size.

Tac,
Yes I am very aware that there are considerable computational steps between the mercury, and microwave readings, and the published monthly data.Because the data deals with differences from a set time I am assuming that these algorithms ,instrument corrections etc do not change otherwise tracking global temperature changes will be extremely difficult and any conclusions could easily be refuted.
What is interesting is that the Hadcrut3 and UAH monthly variance are very close.I assume that the two datasets are independant and this encourages me to press on with my analysis.

A good question. And what’s the status of the RC data links/site/whatever it is? Someone linked to it yesterday I think. I believe when it first came out someone, maybe even Steve, mentioned that there was still lots missing, though it was an improvement. Has anyone actually searched through it to see if needed stuff is hiding in there?

At least that version isn’t very helpful. And the McCracken character made an incorrect statement (I believe)when he claimed that NASA and NOAA went to the original sources for data, as had CRU. In any case, the important thing is knowing exactly what data was used and it’s been like pulling teeth to get that information.

I see a pattern here. A while back, Roger Pielke Jr. was to appear on NPR along with Mann and a couple of others sympathetic to Mann. But Pielke explained, within hours of the program, “NPR called back to let me know they won’t be able to have me on.” Is there any doubt that Mann refuses to face anyone who is willing and able to challenge him?

Mann also wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post back in December to defend himself. He could have tried to refute statements from McIntyre or other experts, but instead, he took on Sarah Palin. He’s clearly afraid of anyone armed with the facts.

I do wish, though, that Roberts had asked for you to respond to McCracken’s statement about ‘hide the decline’. Roberts said (my rough transcript) :

“Datasets have to examined very carefuly. They are valid over certain date ranges and certain conditions.
What was found with the tree-rings .. they were valuable over a certain period, they were set-up to look at a particular period. They didn’t seem to work in more recent decades. That needs to be looked at, there’s no question about that. But that’s true of all data-sets, and the adjustments that have to be made to figure out what they’re really telling us.”

We still know little of what these ‘certain conditions’ are, and we don’t know if these unknown conditions applied for the period under consideration. The divergence problem, while acknowledged, is unresolved – at least it lets us know that sometimes the growth of tree-rings doesn’t reflect the temperature.

Steve, you are truly a hero to many that believe in apolitical science. You have said on several occasions that you believe in global warming and that your only interest is getting the data correct. Given all the problems with the hockey stick, integrity of temp. data sets, UHI, etc., what exactly is the basis for your belief?

As for “Climategate”, Jones has been fully exonerated, so I don’t know whey everybody isn’t just moving on.

Steve, you seemed a little off your game on CNN, and appeared to lack conviction. I get the feeling that this isn’t your favorite topic.

steve: there’s a difference between official institutions deciding not to do anything and institutions carefully investigating and exonerating someone. The Committee did not receive any evidence that discarding tree ring data, for example, was a valid statistical procedure – the Jones resolution was simply a vote of three MPs against one.

Good job Steve, while these types of things are hardly ever as in depth as we would like, I took away from it McCracken admitting the data diverged and should be looked into. I also noticed he did not say it had been.

Slightly different subject:
One of the emails I had read spoke about smoothing out the “bump” in Ocean temps to get the desired results. I wish this email could get more light shone on it as it is long and can not be construed as being taken out of context. The author explained exactly why he was doing it and went to explain he did not want to remove it entirely then someone might notice the miscorrelation between ocean and land temps.